


Unfinished Business

by all_these_ghosts



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Antarctica is really cold, F/M, Fluff, I can't believe that tag already exists!!!!!, Movie: Fight The Future, PWP without Porn, PWPOP FTW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-12
Updated: 2016-12-12
Packaged: 2018-09-08 05:54:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8832970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/all_these_ghosts/pseuds/all_these_ghosts
Summary: "Mulder, you went to Antarctica to find me. Aside from the truly shocking amount of money this is going to cost the FBI, you ignored every kind of protocol and put yourself at great personal risk, and I…” She licks her lips, lifts her free hand to toy with her hair again. “I want to know why.”





	

At the hospital they’re both admitted with hypothermia and superficial frostbite, though he gets released before her. The nurse looks at his chart, sighs, and says, “You get yourself in a lot of trouble, Mr. Mulder.” She tells him to wear some damn mittens next time and then sends him off, but instead of leaving, he tracks down Scully.  


She’s in a different ward, one where the patients have dozens of tubes sticking out of him. But she looks okay enough, considering. Sitting up in bed, she gives him an anemic little wave and a sheepish smile. 

It depresses him a little, how normal it is to see Scully in a hospital gown. His brain barely registers it as unusual.

Mulder sits on the edge of her bed and presses a kiss to the reddened tip of her nose. “We’ve gotta stop meeting like this,” he jokes weakly, and she chuckles a little and leans against his shoulder.

They sit quietly together while _Jeopardy_ plays on the tiny hospital TV. As usual, between the two of them they know all of the answers. “We make a good team,” she says when they both get Double Jeopardy. She nuzzles her nose against his shoulder. Scully’s not normally this cuddly, but he is not going to complain. Maybe it’s the meds.

He’s also not going to remind her that _Jeopardy_ isn’t a team sport.

After the nurses come through on rounds, she surprises him again. Careful of the tubes and wires attached to her body, she scoots to the edge of the bed and motions for him to slide in next to her.

Mulder doesn’t hesitate. Opportunities like this don’t come up nearly often enough.

He tucks her against him, and even under the blankets, even after five days in the hospital, Scully is still cold. He’d sneaked a look at her charts. When they’d made it to the research station, before they were transferred here, her body temperature was 79.3 degrees. Even though the chart claims that it’s normal again, her skin is still icy against his.

But in his arms she sighs and snuggles closer, saying, “Mm, you’re so warm,” and in that moment Mulder vows that he will never complain about her body temperature again.

He falls asleep there next to her, only to wake in the morning when that same nurse pokes him in the shoulder. “You again,” she says, and Mulder gives her his best, most charming smile. It doesn’t work. _Must be getting old_ , he thinks mournfully. The nurse says sharply, “This woman needs to sleep, and you need to go home before I send you home.”

Reluctantly he complies, but before he leaves the room he catches a glimpse of Scully’s face. She’s trying hard to suppress a grin, and not actually succeeding. She always likes it when someone else yells at him. “That means I didn’t have to do it myself,” she’d said smugly after one particularly unpleasant meeting with OPR.

But, well - he spent the night in her bed. (Okay, her hospital bed - but that’s close enough.) She can laugh at him all she wants.

* * *

A few days later Scully’s standing in his doorway, her black suit cinched tight around her waist. Back in fighting shape, and she’s beautiful. The spiderwebs of blood vessels on her cheeks are the only reminder of their ordeal.

He’s trying not to think about it too much. When he’d told the boys about the whole thing they’d just stared at him for a solid minute, until finally Byers said, voice flat with disbelief, “You went to Antarctica to rescue her.”

“Not that she’s not worth it, man,” Frohike had added immediately.

Langly continued, “But you might want to give some thought to the status of your relationship.”

The status of their relationship.

He’d left out the part about how he’d almost kissed her. His subconscious has definitely not forgotten; he’s woken every morning to a raging hard-on and Scully’s perfume in his nostrils. Even in his dreams, he never manages to kiss her.

How small she’d been, collapsing naked into his arms. How fragile.

But she’s neither of those things now. Back in her high heels, lipstick perfectly applied. Once again, Scully is in charge of the world.

She clears her throat. “I, uh, never thanked you. For…” Then she makes a broad hand gesture, which he decides to interpret as …for saving me. She keeps tucking her hair behind her ears; he resists the urge to do it for her. Christ. He wants to touch her everywhere.

Instead, he stuffs his hands in his pockets and makes a joke. “Yeah, it was pretty heroic, wasn’t it?”

Scully looks away, shaking her head and trying not to smile. “Forget it.”

He’s suddenly serious. “Scully,” he says. “Always.”

“You have a good track record so far,” she says. This is true - she’s not dead yet - but they’re nowhere near even. Scully saves his ass about twice a week, it feels like.

“If it weren’t for me you’d never be in those situations,” he says, a little ruefully.

Scully closes the distance between them and takes his hand, her thumb pressing into the space between his thumb and forefinger. It’s just enough pressure to make him sigh. She says, “I wouldn’t be anywhere else.”

That’s when she finally looks up at him, her gaze certain and steady. He’s finding it suddenly hard to breathe. “Does that mean you’re not going to Utah?” he asks, their hands still joined.

“I’m not going to Utah,” she confirms, and his pulse speeds up without his permission.

“And you’re not quitting.”

“I’m not quitting.” A grin tugs at her lips.

“Okay,” he says, as all of the air goes out of his lungs, as about ninety percent of the stress leaves his body. He hadn’t even known how much he was holding in.

But the space between them fills up with something else. They have so much unfinished business, and Mulder is determined to finish it. He’s just not sure how.

“Mulder,” she says, hesitant. “Why did you do it?”

That throws him. “What?”

“All of it. Mulder, you went to Antarctica to find me. Aside from the truly shocking amount of money this is going to cost the FBI, you ignored every kind of protocol and put yourself at great personal risk, and I…” She licks her lips, lifts her free hand to toy with her hair again. “I want to know why.”

So this is what people mean when they say _his heart was in his throat_. Mulder’s sure he’s going to choke on his. His voice sounds twisted and wrong when he finally speaks. “How can you ask me that?”

They are standing, he realizes, the exact same way they were last time. In his hallway when he’d told her everything, then stood by and watched as she was stolen from him. 

Scully says, in a voice that’s barely a whisper, “I need to hear you say it.”

When she reaches her hand up to her hair again he stays her. He wraps his hand around hers, twines his fingers through the spaces between hers. He wants to swallow her whole. His Scully is all restraint and steadiness, but he feels the tremor in her now.

He brings their joined hands to his lips and presses an open-mouthed kiss to her palm. Her eyes darken.

 _This is Scully_ , he reminds himself. Scully who follows him on every insane adventure, who pulls him back from the edge, who not even a year ago was dying in a hospital bed while he raged, unable to contend with his absolute powerlessness.

And now, here in his living room: he is not powerless.

Just like before, he cups her face in his hands. Just like before, he moves in slowly, giving her time to pull away, even though everything in him is straining to avoid that particular ending to this story. Mulder will personally annihilate every bee in the D.C. area to avoid it, if he has to.

He doesn’t have to. 

When their lips finally meet it’s electric.

Scully had been so cold the last time he held her but her skin is flushed now, almost feverish under his hands, and when she opens her mouth her tongue is hot, and he runs his along the cool edges of her teeth. She tastes like toothpaste and red wine, and he wonders how much she had to drink to convince herself to come over and do this.

Mulder kisses her for what’s either five seconds or a thousand years. His hands slide back into her hair, cradling her head, tangling in the soft short strands at the nape of her neck. Her lips are still wind-chapped but it doesn’t stop her from returning his urgent kisses; she angles her head to let him in.

When he breathes out her name, “ _Scully_ ,” he wonders if that’s weird - if, now that he’s kissing her, she’s become Dana - but no. Dana belongs to other people, too, her mother and brothers, her college friends and nephews and all the other men who have loved her, but _Scully_ \- Scully is all his.

He’s loved her for so long.

He pulls back just far enough to unbutton her jacket, pulling it over her elbows and letting it fall in a wrinkled heap to the floor. She doesn’t even glance at it. Scully’s used to Mulder paying her dry cleaning bills. He’d started doing it out of guilt, when he realized how many of her clothes were getting wrecked by monster blood, but now he mostly does it because he likes having her clothes in his car, likes the way they make everything smell like her. He untucks her blouse so he can slide his fingers under the hem, along the smooth skin of her stomach, and what other revelation could anyone need?

“I love you,” he says, low, and his hands tighten on her waist as he says it, so when she gasps he doesn’t know if it’s his words or his touch. “Fuck, Scully,” he exhales, and he knows that’s wrong, it’s not what you’re supposed to say, but he’s never been good at this. His forehead pressed to hers, their lips a breath apart. “Of course I followed you. I didn’t have a choice.”

She says, “Everything is a choice.”

“Not this.” He shakes his head, and his hands pull her a little closer. “And I kept thinking - that maybe you weren’t gonna come back, and the last thing I did was not kiss you. Because of a fucking bee.” He can’t take his eyes off her swollen lips, her flushed cheeks.

“Don’t go all romance novel on me, Mul—“

This time when he kisses her there is no hesitation, and not much gentleness either. Despite her three-inch heels Scully is up on her toes, and when she wraps one leg around his calf and starts running her ankle up and down he thinks he might spontaneously combust, and then _he’ll_ finally make it into the X-files.

He groans her name and she hums back, and he wants to touch her _everywhere_ , he wants her mouth everywhere. He wants to be baptized into the church of Dana Katherine Scully and spend the rest of his life worshipping her.

Her small hands on his chest. She’s touched him a thousand times before, checking his pulse, bandaging his wounds, but she’s never trailed her fingernails over his abs, she’s never fucking _purred_ as she touches him. This Dana Scully is feral, untamed, and he never ever wants to tame her.

“Is this what you want,” he asks, even though she’s been telling him this whole time. She nods and licks her lips, almost self-consciously, and he reaches around to unzip her skirt. Scully steps out of it, now wearing just the heels and a matching set of underwear.

While they’ve never been in this exact circumstance, they’ve been around each other in enough hotel rooms and hospitals that he knows her usual underwear is not matching red lace. Usually her suitcase is full of clean but slightly worn-out gray cotton everything, and this is - well, this is the opposite of gray cotton.

“Scully,” he manages. “Did you - plan this?”

“It wasn’t a plan exactly,” she says, still breathing heavily. He cannot take his eyes off the waistband of her panties, the line where crimson meets the ivory of her skin. The swell of her breasts above the cups of her bra. Briefly his brain flashes ahead to Monday, when he’ll have to sit across from her and try _not_ to picture her in this ensemble. Her voice cuts through his distraction: “But before - in your hallway, you—“

“That wasn’t a complaint,” he says hurriedly. He does not want her to get the wrong impression. “It’s pretty much the sexiest thing I can think of.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Really, Mulder? I thought you had a better imagination than that.” And then she leans in, deadly, and says against his ear, “I can think of _much_ sexier things.”

When he dies, she’s gonna be the cause of death on the autopsy report. It’s just going to say _excessive arousal._

“This is really happening,” he says, just to clarify. He barely recognizes the sound of his own voice.

“This is really happening,” she confirms. She finishes unbuttoning her shirt and then gets to work on his, and the press of their bare skin together is almost too much for him to take.

He notices, suddenly, now that he’s breathing again, that her skin - God, all of that skin - is covered in bruises, and he steps back to look at her, keeping one hand on her upper arm. “Scully…” he says.

“I’m fine,” she responds, and when he levels his gaze at her she says it again, more insistent. “I’m _fine_. I’m healing.”

“I don’t want to hurt you.” It seems like a ridiculous thing to say, after everything.

“I’m not worried about that,” she says firmly.

He nods, feeling like a puppet on a string, unable to move except as she moves him. It’s all too much, all at once, Scully in front of him almost naked and entirely perfect.

But he still can’t stop the gears from turning, stop his brain from making excuses. Impossible things happen every day, he knows, but the idea that Scully wants him as badly as he wants her - that she would put on red lace underwear and show up at his apartment to seduce him - seems so much more unlikely than ghosts or aliens and he can’t stop himself from saying out loud, “I just—“

“ _Mulder_.” It’s how she always says his name, this familiar half-fond and half-exasperated sound, but this time she accompanies it with her hands on his chest. His heartbeat against her hands. Breathe, he tells himself. She says, “Stop talking.”

So he does.


End file.
